This week’s highlights: Solitude, Remote Work, and Gen-Z’s Approach to File Storage

Issue 443
Happy Friday!
Greetings from quarantine! An asymptomatic kiddo, but a positive test, brought the inevitable to our house. Hopefully you all are staying healthy.
Original Content this week:
- My New Rule – No Networking Before Lunch – Knowing how to coordinate one’s work is important, but optimizing your time to deliver the highest possible output is completely different.
Just for fun (though sure to aggravate someone)
- JohnCrist – Guy Who Prefers Pepsi Over Coke. “I’ve experienced excellence, I just prefer my products one level below.”
Best,
David
Food for Thought
- I&M – On Solitude Over 15 years ago, I took my first device-free, silent, solitude experience. 15 years and 100s of “solos” later, I can say the following with confidence: If I could give any bit of advice to my younger self, it would be to spend one or two Saturdays a month in device-free solitude
- JP – On Ian Fleming As Craftsman – The new Bond movie finally premiered in London this week…
- CF – Dangerous Feelings – “Success has a nasty tendency to increase confidence more than ability. The longer it lasts, and the more it was tied to some degree of serendipity, the truer that becomes.”
- WSJ – Facebook’s Effort to Attract Preteens Goes Beyond Instagram Kids, Documents Show. *paywall* It has investigated how to engage young users in response to competition from Snapchat, TikTok; ‘Exploring playdates as a growth lever’
- NYT – The Cost of Insuring Expensive Waterfront Homes Is About to Skyrocket – Market based pricing of flood risk is beginning to creep into the long-subsided federal flood insurance program. If you own a beach house, buckle up, prices are going up, way up.
Business
- Reuters – PwC offers U.S. employees full-time remote work
- WSJ – Burned Out and Restless From the Pandemic, Women Redefine Their Career Ambitions *paywall* A comprehensive new study by McKinsey and Lean In shows how stressed and exhausted many professional women are. And many of them are rethinking what they want from their work lives.
- Greycourt – The Current Case for Equity Long-Short Hedge Funds
- Verdad – The Efficacy and Cost of Hedging With Options
- WashPo – Workers are putting on pants to return to the office only to be on Zoom all day
Culture / Arts/ Tech / Science
- Verge – File Not Found Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
- SR – A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea Some insane archeology to uncover this
- WashPo – Here are 9 home maintenance tasks for your October to-do list
- TM – How Can I Avoid Buying Excess for My Children? A more sensible and intentional approach to providing playthings for our children
- Jalopnik – RV Dealerships Think New Campers Are Pieces of Junk, Too – The ‘other housing boom’ hasn’t been good for quality…
My Book:
When Anything is Possible – Wealth and the Art of Strategic Living
The book is about how we shift from focusing on the things we want to avoid, to the things we want to accomplish with our wealth. Doing so requires a person to articulate 3 key items – Wealth Structure, Wealth Identity and ultimately a Wealth Strategy. The book walks through each of these items in great depth, and guides the reader through a process to develop each.
If you are interested in learning more, visit here and download a free chapter.